Square One

This is my first blog post so I guess I should introduce myself: My name is John Youngblood and I am a current student at the College of Charleston. My major is in Computer Science B.S. and I am also working towards minors in Physics and Math. My specific interests when it comes to the world of Technology are:

• Artificial Intelligence (with an emphasis on game logic)
• Music Editing and Creating Software
• Graphic Processing
• Physics Engines

That is a quick overview of my interest in terms of computers and should give you a sense of what strive to do with my degree once a graduate this Spring.

Now onto the purpose of this blog. This blog will be mainly used for my Software Engineering Practicum (CSCI-462) class to keep track of my and my team's progress throughout this spring semester. This class' aim is to simulate a software developing environment (like ones we would experience in our future Computer Science careers) by placing the students into teams of 4 and have them choose and work on a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS). The teams will then join the FOSS project community and contribute to the project by fixing bugs prescribed by the project community, designing software and patches for the FOSS, and using modern unit-testing techniques on the FOSS's source code.

On the first day of class we split up into our project teams for the semester. Since I had taken the requisite class of CSCI-362 three semesters ago I was new in the class since everyone else had taken CSCI-362 together this past fall semester, but I still knew some of the other students from previous classes we've had together. I first teamed up with my friend Justin Wooton, and since we had just been lab partners in Introduction to Electronics last semester I knew we worked excellent together. We then joined with another group of two, Joseph Black and Matthew Lannan, to form our team. After a brief introduction we got to talking about what sort of project we would like to work with for the semester. It soon became readily apparent that we all were interested in trying something not written in java like we are used to, and that we all thought working on a music related FOSS would be awesome. We then adjourned and went off to go do our own individual research into possible FOSS to work on.

Our homework for the first day is to read through the first two chapters of Teaching Open Source. TOS is an open-source textbook that teaches the basic skills of open source development (SO META).